#ed... ward...

Transmutation was first observed in the early 20th century, when Frederick Soddy and Ernest Rutherford realized that their radium was turning itself into thorium. Soddy was the first one to use the word, to which Rutherford replied, “for Christ's sake, Soddy, don't call it transmutation. They'll have our heads off as alchemists!”

These days, one of the easier ways to induce transmutation in otherwise stable elements is to bombard them with neutron radiation. When a fusion reactor is burning a deuterium-tritium fuel mixture, there are just. So many neutrons. I’ve designed stuff for a tokamak that was running on just deuterium, and that was way more forgiving. By comparison to a D-T tokamak like SPARC, the neutron flux was basically a warm summer breeze.

So, not only does everything have to take the massive heat loads, magnetic fields, and electrical forces of a tokamak, I have to make sure it doesn’t transmute into anything stupid in the process. I don’t have the luxury of being able to use water shielding, either. I’m putting stuff, like, centimeters away from the fusion plasma, with nothing in between but vacuum and wishes.

Fortunately for me, this isn’t as big a problem as you might expect.  Some elements are way harder to transmute than others. Like, nickel will start turning into iron and cobalt pretty fast, but you can blast beryllium with neutrons until the cows come home. Right now, my biggest headache is silver.

A lot of my designs need to be brazed together — the same basic process that you use in plumbing or refrigeration, where you permanently join pipes with a filler alloy and a propane torch. Unfortunately, almost every useful braze filler out there is chock full of silver, and silver just loves to transmute into cadmium. Cadmium is (A) extremely toxic, and (B) pretty dang brittle.

[image ID: a tweet from @snickelsox asking what their followers would do if they were to create the next werebeast/lycanthrope monster to add to D&D. The response from @ooccttoo says that they would add a were-chimera that combines multiple forms into one. End ID]

I just can’t get enough.

In my games, the first transformation of a lycanthrope is very important. It’s the moment that the cursed victim truly “becomes” a lycanthrope. Once that first transformation happens, the curse can only be lifted with a Wish or a lengthy sidequest for a specific cure (see my post on curing lycanthropy).

But here’s a question: what happens if someone gets cursed multiple times before they first transform? Obviously a werewolf is immune to wererat lycanthropy, but what if the werewolf isn’t a werewolf really yet because it hasn’t transformed? Enter the Werechimera, or weremera for short. My blog’s mascot, my good friend’s paladin PC Nadine of the Flame, (and this blog’s namesake) is essentially weremera herself, being a mix of lion, goat, and... bobcat? I think? I was never sure.

But how does it work?

It’s super simple. Mechanically, for every type of lycanthrope the character has failed their Constitution saving throw against you add another attack option. So a weremera cursed by a werewolf, a wererat, and a wereboar will have two bite attacks and a tusk attack available with the damage dice of the creature that infected them. The multiattack also upgrades, becoming “one melee weapon attack and one lycanthropy-afflicting attack per curse you carry.” So a werewolf/wererat weremera could do three attacks per round (two of them being bites). The chance of spreading a curse increases that much more!

How this manifests cosmetically is up to you and mostly depends on how far you want to lean into body horror. You could make the hybrid form look mostly like one of the standard hybrids with some influence from the others. For example, our above example could be a werewolf with a somewhat ratty face and tusks coming from its jaws (Nadine’s like that; with the face of a lion and the hooves of a ram. I think the tail is the bobcat bit?) . But you could also have it be a creature with three heads, one of a boar, a wolf, and a rat, and six arms of varying length and strength. Get super fucked-up and creative with it! Or, if that doesn’t interest you, you could go full comedy and have it be all Three Stooges meets Cerberus, with each head being a different version of the character’s personality squabbling for control. Whatever floats your goat!

The curse should also be even harder, if not impossible to cure than regular lycanthropy. The consequences to the character’s mind should also be severe with outright madness being a distinct possibility. Throwing in some multiple personality disorder (or at least the pop culture version) wouldn’t be remiss, but you should check with your group before going into that. In fact, you should probably check if your group is into the physical and mental horror elements of this concept before you commit to it.